Applied Research

NITRD Program

Applied Research Partner Project Highlights

NARA’s Applied Research partners work with us to leverage new theories, knowledge, methods and techniques to advance our knowledge about the lifecycle of electronic records. The following projects highlight research coordinated through the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program, highlighting work that impacts the lifecycle management of records.

Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)

PERPOS – A suite of tools that support archival processes for Accessioning, Preservation, Arrangement, Review/Redaction, and Description of electronic records; PERPOS was initially designed to process Presidential Records.

Robust Digital File Format Identification – Tools and improved methods for automated file type identification and technology transfer to the National Archives of the UK for incorporation into PRONOM/DROID.

Texas Advanced Computing Center
(TACC), University of Texas

Visualization Framework – A scalable solution that combines different data analysis methods into a visualization framework that facilitates understanding of large-scale collections of electronic records.

The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

CI-BER – The Cyberinfrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records is NARA’s electronic records testbed, enabling the examination of relevant preservation/access technologies and processes for large volumes of diverse and complex electronic records that may be stored in various repositories. CI-BER includes tools supporting search of large digital records collections from tablets or smart phones based on geospatial attributes mined from individual files in the collections.

iRODS – The Integrated Rule Oriented Data System is an open source data grid that helps in the organization and management of large collections of distributed digital data.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Research Projects:

Software:

CSR - The Conversion Software Registry is a repository of information about software packages that are capable of file format conversions. This registry complements file format registries – such as PRONOM, above, and the Unified Digital Format Registry (UDFR) – motivated by a community need for finding file format conversions inaccessible via current search methods.